History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  Hence, by a sort of tacit conspiracy, the question of the special status for the Jews was dropped. As there was no statute stopping them from coming, they came. As the Council said they could practise their religion, they practised it. When the Conventical Act, aimed at Nonconformists, was passed in 1664, the Jews, led by their new rabbi, Jacob Sasportas, took their anxieties to Charles II, who told them, ‘laughing and spitting’, not to worry; and later the Privy Council put it in writing that Jews could ‘promise themselves the effects of the same favour as formerly they have had, so long as they demean themselves peaceably and quietly, with due obedience to His Majesty’s laws and without scandal to his government’.

  Thus the English Jews, by an act of omission, as it were, became full citizens, subject to no more disabilities than those inherent in their own unwillingness, like Catholics and Nonconformists, to belong to the Church of England or, in their particular case, to swear Christian oaths. Over the next generation, various judicial rulings established the right of Jews to plead and give evidence in the courts, and to have their religious susceptibilities recognized for this purpose. It is true that, like other non-Anglicans, they were barred from many offices and from parliament. But there were no legal restraints, as such, on their economic activities. Indeed discrimination arose chiefly within the Jewish community. Its dominant Sephardi element still felt insecure and deplored any influx of poor Ashkenazi Jews, especially if the community had to support them. It ruled in 1678-9 that German Jews could not be allowed to hold office, vote at meetings or read the scrolls. But this ruling was found to be against Jewish law and had to be modified. So far as the English courts were concerned, the Jews seem to have received justice and protection from the start, English judges in general being well disposed to hard-working, law-abiding citizens who did not disturb the king’s peace. Indeed in 1732 a judgment gave Jews, in effect, legal protection against generic libels which might endanger life. Hence almost by accident England became the first place in which it was possible for a modern Jewish community to emerge.

  The consequences in America were still more important. In 1654 the French privateer St Catherine brought twenty-three Jewish refugees from Recife in Brazil to the Dutch colonial town of New Amsterdam. As in Amsterdam itself, the position of Jews under Dutch colonial rule was uncertain: Calvinists, though better disposed than Lutherans, could also be oppressive and anti-Semitic. The Governor of New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant, protested to the Dutch West India Company against this settlement of what he termed ‘a deceitful race’ whose ‘abominable religion’ worshipped ‘the feet of Mammon’. The Jews were allowed to stay but they were not accorded any rights and company and governor united to forbid them to build a synagogue. But any ambiguities were resolved in 1664 when the town fell to the English and became New York. Thereafter the Jews enjoyed not only the advantages of English citizenship but the additional religious freedoms the colonists in the New World had taken for themselves.

  Richard Nicholls, New York’s first English governor, stressed the right to freedom of worship when he proclaimed in 1665: ‘No person shall be molested, fined or imprisoned for differing in judgment in matters of religion, who profess Christianity.’ The omission of any reference to Judaism seems to have been an oversight. The English wanted colonists, especially those with mercantile skills and good trading contacts. The next governor, Edmund Andros, made no reference to Christianity when he promised equal treatment and protection to law-abiding persons ‘of what religion soever’. As in England, the issue of Jewishness was not raised. Jews simply came, built houses, enjoyed equal rights and, it seems, voted in the earliest elections; they held offices too.70

  They began to settle in other areas, notably the Delaware Valley and Rhode Island, which Roger Williams had founded as a libertarian colony where no religious bars whatever applied. Some difficulties arose when Jews wished to have their own cemetery in New York. But in 1677 one was opened in Newport, RI—later the subject of one of Longfellow’s finest poems—and New York got its own five years later. In 1730 the Shearith Israel Congregation in New York consecrated its first synagogue, and a particularly fine new one was built at Newport in 1763, today a national shrine. Under the English Navigation Acts, trade within colonies and the mother country was limited to English citizens; and when the imperial parliament enacted the Naturalization Act for the North American colonies, the Jews were allowed to acquire citizenship on a par with Christian settlers, two provisions being dropped to allow for Jewish scruples. Hence the Swede Peter Kalm, visiting New York in 1740, recorded that Jews ‘enjoy all the privileges common to the other inhabitants of this town and province’.71 It was the same in Philadelphia, where an important Jewish colony began to grow up from the 1730s onwards.

  Thus was born American Jewry. It was, from the start, unlike any Jewry elsewhere. In Europe and Afro-Asia, where religious barriers were universal in some form, the Jews always had to negotiate or have imposed upon them a special status. This obliged them to form specific and usually legally defined communities, wherever they settled. To a greater or lesser extent, all these Jewish communities were self-governing, even though the actual condition of the Jews might be miserable and perilous. In Poland, under the monarchy, the Jews enjoyed a kind of home rule, governing themselves through the Councils of the Lands, which their wealthier members elected. They were taxed more heavily than the surrounding Poles and had no real right of self-defence, but otherwise they ran their own affairs. To a less pronounced extent this was true of every Jewish settlement in Continental Europe. The Jews always ran their own schools, courts, hospitals and social services. They appointed and paid their own officials, rabbis, judges, slaughterers, circumcisers, schoolteachers, bakers and cleaners. They had their own shops. Wherever they were, the Jews formed tiny states within states. This was the ghetto system, and it applied even in places like Amsterdam where no legal ghettoing existed.

  In North America it was quite different, even before the United States attained independence. With the virtual absence of religious-determined law, there was no reason why Jews should operate a separate legal system, except on matters which could be seen as merely internal religious discipline. Since all religious groups had virtually equal rights, there was no point in any constituting itself into a separate community. All could participate in a common society. Hence from the start, the Jews in America were not organized on communal but on congregational lines, like the other churches. In Europe, the synagogue was merely one organ of the all-embracing Jewish community. In North America it was the only governing body in Jewish life. American Jews did not belong to ‘the Jewish community’, as they did in Europe. They belonged to a particular synagogue. It might be Sephardi or Ashkenazi; or, of the latter, it might be German, English, Holland, Polish, all of them differing on small ritual points. Protestant groups were divided on comparable lines. Hence a Jew went to ‘his’ synagogue, just as a Protestant went to ‘his’ church. In other respects, both Jew and Protestant were part of the general citizenry, in which they merged as secular units. Thus for the first time Jews, without in any way renouncing their religion, began to achieve integration.

  This was of enormous long-term consequence when the Jewish population of North America began to expand rapidly.72 For it meant that Jewry was no longer a dualism: Erez Israel and the diaspora. The Jewish presence in the world formed, rather, a tripod of forces: Israel, the diaspora, American Jewry, which was quite different in kind to any other diaspora settlement and proved, in the end, the Third Force which enabled the Zionist state to come into existence.

  This was in the future, but even in the early modern period the acceptance of the Jews in the Anglo-Saxon area of power began to have a growing impact on the role Jews played in the economy, giving it a permanency and stability it had never possessed before. At various times, in antiquity, in the Dark and early Middle Ages, in the seventeenth century, the Jews had been brilliant traders and entrepreneurs, and often extremely successful one
s. But Jewish economic power was ultra-vulnerable, with little security in law. In both Christendom and Islam Jewish fortunes were liable to arbitrary seizure at any time. One might say that the Nazi assault on Jewish business, 1933-9, or the confiscations of Jewish property by Arab states in 1948-50, were merely the last and most comprehensive of such economic attacks on the Jews. As a result, during the period up to the mid-seventeenth century, Jewish fortunes were transitory or at best migratory, and the Jewish contribution to the growth of an international, entrepreneurial economy was correspondingly restricted. The Jews had always been skilful at using and transferring capital. But once they were established in Anglo-Saxon society, the security they then enjoyed in law enabled them to accumulate it too. Confidence in their rights led Jews to expand the scope of their activities. Trading, especially in articles of small volume and high value, such as jewels, easily concealed and whisked from place to place, no longer constituted almost the sole economic occupation in which Jews found it safe to engage.

  The pattern can be seen changing in eighteenth-century America. At the beginning of the century, the Jews there were almost entirely concentrated in the overseas trading sector, dealing in jewels, coral, textiles, slaves, cocoa and ginger. In 1701 in New York, though only 1 per cent of the population, they formed 12 per cent of the overseas trading community. By 1776, this proportion had fallen to only 1 per cent, as the Jews, feeling increasingly settled, secure and accepted, turned their backs on the sea—their traditional escape-route—and began to look inland, to developing the continent. They became settlers themselves, and sold guns, rum, wine, ironware, glass, furs and provisions.

  In Europe, the financial means which held together the great coalition against Louis XIV, and eventually broke his military dominance of Europe—as it was to do Napoleon’s—was largely assembled by Jews. William of Orange, later William III of England, who led the coalition from 1672 to 1702, was financed and provisioned by a group of Dutch Sephardi Jews operating chiefly from The Hague. The two leading providiteurs general, as William had them called, were Antonio Alvarez Machado and Jacob Pereira. As we have seen, such men, however useful they might be to Continental princes, had to operate in a climate of financial and personal insecurity. It required intense pressure from William and the Austrian emperor, for instance, to secure Machado or his agents admission into a city like Cologne. England, by contrast, was a far more secure base from which to operate. In 1688 the Lopez Suasso family advanced William two million gulden to finance his invasion of England, Suasso telling him: ‘If you are fortunate, I know you will pay me back. If you are unlucky, I agree to lose them.’73 Once William was safely installed many Jewish financiers moved to London, led by Pereira’s son Isaac, who became commissary-general there, being paid the enormous sum of £95,000 for shipping and supplies during the year September 1690 to August 1691.74

  In London the Jews became a founding element in the financial market of the City which grew up in William’s day. The element of anti-Jewish blackmail, which dominated Jewish-state relations on the Continent, was not wholly absent to begin with. The Earl of Shrewsbury, as secretary of state, wrote to the Lord Mayor in February 1690: ‘Taking into consideration that the Jews residing in London carry on, under favour of the government, so advantageous a trade’, their ‘offer only of £12,000’ was ‘below what His Majesty expected of them’; it ought, he added, to be doubled to £20,000 or even raised to £30,000; and ‘His Majesty believes that, upon second thoughts’, they will ‘come to new resolutions’.75 But the English government did not confiscate Jewish fortunes or rob Jews by oppressive lawsuits. Solomon de Medina, chief London agent for the Hague consortium, was never brought to book for his many misdeeds—he admitted he bribed the Duke of Marlborough, the allied captain-general, £6,000 a year during the years 1707-11. William III had dined with him in Richmond in 1699 and knighted him the following year, and if Solomon ended up practically bankrupt, that was due to his own miscalculations, not to anti-Semitic fury.76

  Whereas in central Europe the pillaging of an Oppenheimer could produce financial crisis, the London Jews, secure in their property, were able to help the state to avoid them. The Menasseh Lopes family under Queen Anne, the Gideons and the Salvadors under the first three Georges, played notable roles in maintaining the stability of London financial markets. They avoided the South Sea Bubble. When the Jacobite rising of 1745 panicked the City, Samson Gideon (1699-1762) raised £1,700,000 to help the government restore calm. At his death he left over £500,000, which went to his heir, not the government—though the Gideons moved into the House of Lords and out of Judaism.77

  It was the unconscious collective instinct of the Jews both to depersonalize finance and to rationalize the general economic process. Any property known to be Jewish, or clearly identifiable as such, was always at risk in medieval and early modern times, especially in the Mediterranean, which was then the chief international trading area. As the Spanish navy and the Knights of Malta treated Jewish-chartered ships and goods as legitimate booty, fictitious Christian names were used in the paperwork of international transactions, including marine insurance. These developed into impersonal formulae. As well as developing letters of credit, the Jews invented bearer-bonds, another impersonal way of moving money. For an underprivileged community whose property was always under threat, and who might be forced to move at short notice, the emergence of reliable, impersonal paper money, whether bills of exchange or, above all, valid banknotes, was an enormous blessing.

  Hence the whole thrust of Jewish activity in the early modern period was to refine these devices and bring them into universal use. They strongly supported the emergence of the institutions which promoted paper values: the central banks, led by the Bank of England (1694) with its statutory right to issue notes, and the stock exchanges. Jews dominated the Amsterdam stock exchange, where they held large quantities of stock from both the West and East India Companies, and were the first to run a large-scale trade in securities. In London they set the same pattern a generation later in the 1690s. Joseph de la Vega, an Amsterdam Jew (though a nominal Protestant) wrote the earliest account of stock exchange business in 1688, and Jews were probably the first professional stock jobbers and brokers in England: in 1697, out of one hundred brokers on the London exchange, twenty were Jews or aliens. In due course, Jews helped to create the New York stock exchange in 1792.

  Next to the development of credit itself, the invention and still more the popularization of paper securities were probably the biggest single contribution the Jews made to the wealth-creation process. Jews hastened the use of securities just as much in areas where they felt safe as in areas where they were vulnerable, for they saw the entire world as a single market. Here, too, the global perspective which the diaspora gave them turned them into pioneers. For a race without a country, the world was a home. The further the market stretched, the greater were the opportunities. For people who had been trading regularly from Cairo to China in the tenth century, the opening up of the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans to commerce in the eighteenth century was no great challenge. The first wholesale trader in Australia was a Montefiore. The Sassoons built the first textile mills and factories in Bombay. Benjamin Norden and Samuel Marks started up industry in Cape Colony. The Jews were in the whaling trade at both poles. More important than these specific pioneering efforts was the Jewish drive to create world markets for the staple articles of modern commerce—wheat, wool, flax, textiles, spirits, sugar, tobacco. The Jews went into new areas. They took big risks. They dealt in a wide variety of goods. They held big stocks.

  Jewish financial and trading activities in the eighteenth century became so widely diffused that economic historians have sometimes been tempted to regard them as the primary force in creating the modern capitalist system. In 1911 the German sociologist Werner Sombart published a remarkable book, Die Juden und das Wirt-schlaftsleben, in which he argued that Jewish traders and manufacturers, excluded from the guilds, developed a de
structive antipathy to the fundamentals of medieval commerce. These were primitive and unprogressive: the desire for ‘just’ (and fixed) wages and prices, for an equitable system in which shares of the market were agreed and unchanging, profits and livelihoods modest but guaranteed, and limits placed on production. Excluded from the system, Sombart argued, the Jews broke it up and replaced it with modern capitalism, in which competition was unlimited and pleasing the customer was the only law.78 Sombart’s work was later discredited because it was used by the Nazis to justify their distinction between Jewish commercial cosmopolitanism and German national culture; and Sombart himself, in Deutscher Sozialismus (1934), endorsed the Nazi policy of excluding Jews from German economic life. Sombart’s thesis contained an element of truth but the conclusions he reached were exaggerated. Like Max Weber’s attempt to attribute the spirit of capitalism to Calvinist ethics, it left out inconvenient facts. Sombart ignored the powerful mystical element in Judaism. He refused to recognize, as did Weber, that wherever these religious systems, including Judaism, were at their most powerful and authoritarian, commerce did not flourish. Jewish businessmen, like Calvinist ones, tended to operate most successfully when they had left their traditional religious environment and had moved to fresh pastures.

  But if Jews formed only one of the elements in creating the modern commercial system, it was certainly an influential one. They rationalized what had previously been a comfortable, traditional and often obscurantist process. Their influence was exercised in five principal ways. First they favoured innovation. The stock market was a case in point. This was an efficient and rational way of raising capital and allocating it to the most productive purposes. Traditional mercantile interests, unable to distinguish between the market’s occasional excesses and its fundamental validity, objected. In 1733, Sir John Barnard MP introduced, with all-party support, a Bill to make illegal ‘the infamous practice of stockjobbing’. Postlethwayt’s Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce (1757) condemns ‘those mountebanks we very properly call stockbrokers’. Stockjobbing was ‘a public grievance’, ‘scandalous to the nation’. Many of these accusations were dealt with by the Portuguese Jew Joseph de Pinto in his Traité du crédit et de la circulation (1771). In general, financial innovations which Jews pioneered in the eighteenth century, and which aroused much criticism then, became acceptable in the nineteenth.